Hiring good employees can be expensive. We recently took a look at just how costly it can be, and the numbers should be sobering for any HR professional or finance executive. It can cost between 10 and 30 percent of his or her annual salary to replace a departed employee making less than $75,000 a year, and high-skilled demanding jobs can cost employers up to 200 percent to re-staff after a valuable employee heads for “greener” pastures.

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd understands the importance of low turnover for the bottom line as well as any executive. Oracle has almost 140,000 employees, which means that small changes can have huge impacts when it comes to employee satisfaction, job performance, and retention. It’s very much in his interest to ensure that Oracle’s employees feel like they’re part of something great, and creating that atmosphere has to begin on day one of every new hire’s tenure, no matter where they work or what they’ve been brought on board to do.

Early in his tenure, Hurd discovered something problematic about Oracle’s onboarding processes: they weren’t consistent, they weren’t comprehensive, and they just weren’t working to get most new hires up to speed. At least, that was the opinion of Oracle employees surveyed on previous onboarding practices. Hurd discussed this particular issue at length during his keynote speech at Oracle’s HCM World conference this year:

“We have to do our best to make it easy to assimilate into the company. We had 35 percent favorability, if I remember right… about our onboarding. So it figures I had the easy part of this. I got the data and didn't like it, and I told [Oracle EVP of Human Resources Joyce Westerdahl] to fix it. Somebody on Joyce's team did a lot of work to start to get common website capability, common training capabilities. ‘How do you join a company and get a PC?’ ‘How do you join the company and get a mobile phone?’ ‘How do you get an employee number? How do you get a badge?’

All of this stuff sounds so rudimentary, but it was taking weeks for some of this stuff to get done. And in the meantime, the employee's unmotivated and doesn't understand where the resources are. I think in our last couple of surveys we raised that from 35 percent favorable to around 80 percent favorable, just by the work that was done. That's a really good example for us, to our people. We listened to you, we evaluated what you said, we acted, and we got a better answer.”

Onboarding can be one of the most critical times in an employee’s tenure. Their experience in those first few days sets the tone for how they perceive their new employer and their new coworkers. A smooth and effortless onboarding experience sets both employer and employee up for success, while a rocky start can leave a new hire wondering just what they’ve gotten themselves into. The data shows, time and time again, that a great onboarding process will more than pay for itself over the long run:

Up to 20 percent of turnover happens in the first 45 days of employment

Standard onboarding processes lead to 54 percent greater productivity in new hires

Companies lose up to 2.5 percent of their revenue to new hire learning curves

At Oracle, we’ve done more than improve our onboarding practices — we’ve taken what we’ve learned and used it to build a complete onboarding solution as part of our Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud. The technology behind this solution works not only with brand-new employees, but with employees moving into a new role in the same organization. It even covers “pre-boarding,” that period of time between accepting a job offer and showing up at the office for the first day of work. Acclimating new hires to the company culture and introducing them to their peers in advance can further speed and streamline the transition from first-day jitters to all-star performance.

Would you like to learn more about how we turned our CEO’s insight into actionable processes, and how we can put those processes to work for you? Click here to get started.

There are some Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud customer stories we have the honor of sharing, that surpass all metrics, all odds, and make you forget about technology for a second. Cantor Fitzgerald, the global financial services firm, is one of them.

Oracle Senior Writer, Linda Currey Post, sat down with Michael Chang, Cantor Fitzgerald's director of human resources operations, to discuss overcoming the loss of 68% of their workforce on 9/11, and how they are currently thriving as a business and adopting new cloud technology to enable their transformation.

Cantor Fitzgerald, the global financial services firm, suffered catastrophic losses on September 11, 2001, when an airliner hijacked by terrorists hit its headquarters in the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center. More than 60 percent of the company’s workforce at the time—658 people—perished.

Seventeen years later, the firm is flourishing. With a new headquarters in midtown Manhattan, CantorFitzgerald now employs more than 12,000 people, who work in 60 offices in 20 countries.

Under the leadership of chairman and CEO Howard Lutnick, the firm, which provides investment banking, prime brokerage and commercial real estate services, has also become a philanthropic force. The Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund has distributed $320 million in support of both the families of employees who were killed on 9/11 (including the chairman’s brother, Gary), as well as other victims of terrorism and natural disasters.

And every year on 9/11, which the firm now calls Charity Day, the company donates its revenues and its traders donate their commissions, raising $147 million so far for nonprofit agencies that can apply for grants. Celebrities including Lady Gaga, Jake Gyllenhaal and Eli Manning have joined the traders in calling customers to encourage them to complete more trades and raise more money.

New HCM System Tracks Growth

Cantor Fitzgerald’s entire trading business depends on robust technology. It was an electronic trading pioneer in the 1990s with its eSpeed platform, taking that e-trading subsidiary public in 1999.

It also moved recently to a state-of-the-art human capital management system, choosing Oracle HCM Cloud to help the firm keep pace with its frequent acquisitions and the resulting growth in the number of employees, says Michael Chang, Cantor Fitzgerald’s director of HR operations.

When Cantor Fitzgerald acquires companies, Chang says, their employee records are often difficult for the headquarters HR team to access. “Now we can put all our employee data into one global single instance of Oracle HCM Cloud, which allows us to apply analytics to get accurate insight into who our employees are, where they are and the lines of business they support,” he says.

Want to learn more? Find where Cantor Fitzgerald is today with their cloud upgrade in the original article by Currey Post on WSJ.com.

How to effectively manage your talent continues to be a hot topic discussed and explored by organizations. By now companies are familiar with the popular buzz-phrase, "employee engagement." Organizations understand the importance of defining their workplace culture and hiring the right talent with key skills and personal goals that align with those of the company. They are even taking that extra step and investing in their employees’ experience, because employee satisfaction is the key to increasing employee engagement, retention, and productivity, right?

And yet, here are three shocking statistics you need to know about your workforce:

While workplace culture and employee satisfaction are critical components to engagement, there is still a disconnect between employees and their workplace.

Where is the millennial voice in this conversation?

As a millennial working in Silicon Valley and human resources software, I've seen firsthand how companies struggle with effective talent management within their organizations. For Bay Area companies, the competition to attract and retain talent is fierce—especially when your competitors offer everything under the sun to get talent through their door. I've witnessed my peers recruited to companies by attractive work perks and a laid-back culture, promising work-life balance and fun! For a while this works. Who doesn’t love free meals, working remotely, and taking a break with furry office friends? However, despite these attractive incentives, these same peers never stay longer than a year or two.

So, what gives?

This is because employee satisfaction does not guarantee engagement, and your disengaged employees are already looking for their next career move. Millennials are among the lowest percentage of engaged employees, and from this we've gotten a bad rap. We are often stereotyped as impatient, selfish, and disloyal job-hoppers. Truthfully, job-hopping has become the norm for the rapidly growing millennial workforce, and according to a LinkedIn survey, it's nearly doubled in frequency over the last 20 years. But what our "disloyalty" reveals is that our professional needs are not being met.

There is a misalignment between organizations’ perceptions of what millennials value and what we actually value that is perpetuating this behavior.

So, without further ado, here it is: Everything your company needs to know about what your millennial workers really want and how to engage us, shared directly from a millennial herself.

Millennials wanta defined career path with advancement opportunities.

If a company can't provide this, it’s already lost us.

Future career opportunity is one of the top three global drivers of attrition. Millennials highly value a job that will accelerate professional and career development. Perhaps it’s the stage of our lives that we are in, but this can be a big miss for organizations that are not prepared to show us what’s next.

Six months ago, I was at a crossroads in my career, thinking critically about my future. Oracle provided a clear roadmap of career path opportunities and the key competencies required for advancement in roles of interest, preventing me from seeking outside opportunities and enabling me to successfully transition to my desired role.

Companies that offer career mapping are on the right track! Your millennials will feel empowered about their career decisions and more motivated in their work when they understand the criteria your company has set on what it takes to advance.

Millennials want a coach, not a manager.

Ambitious as we are to advance our careers, we want a “coach” who can help us learn and grow in our current role. More so than other management styles, coaching helps employees understand what needs to be done and unlocks their willingness and potential to learn from failure.

Begin with a discussion around goals. According to a Gallup survey, employees are almost three times more likely than others to be engaged when they’ve had a conversation with their manager around goals and successes in the last six months. Managers that set well-thought-out goals provide clarity for expectations and measuring success, allowing millennial workers to develop professionally. We can understand our strengths and weaknesses and feel accomplished when we succeed, which leads to greater engagement.

But don’t forget the millennial has goals too! We want to share our professional aspirations with our managers and have a say in setting performance expectations that are fair but challenging. My best managers have always taken the time to understand my personal goals and worked with me to align them with the business objectives, resulting in greater motivation and productivity.

Millennials want feedback. All. The. Time.

Surprise! Along with collaborative goal setting, we want feedback from our managers 50 percent more often than other employees, and as frequently as once per week. We are the digital natives, and as such, we are used to getting instant feedback at the touch of a button in order to learn and grow.

Annual performance reviews and quarterly check-ins aren’t enough to keep us engaged. Ongoing feedback from management enables us to see how our daily performance aligns with our goals, and supports our professional development (which we already know is a top priority for millennials).

As a millennial, I can tell you that I appreciate the time my manager makes to provide an open-door policy for continuous feedback. Getting the managerial perspective not only provides direction, but it speaks to the quality of my work and enables the sharing of knowledge for professional growth. For me, this is a motivator to keep elevating my performance and keeps me happy and engaged.

HR leaders and managers need to be proactive with their engagement strategies and development opportunities if they are to retain their millennial workers. As one of these leaders, begin by showing your workforce that they have a future with your organization where they can learn, develop, and succeed.

Managing human resources for a large enterprise can be incredibly challenging. Hiring one new employee often involves a half-dozen or more steps, spread out across weeks or months. A company like Oracle needs to hire thousands of people each year—if hiring processes were conducted manually for every applicant, it would leave the HR department no time to do anything else.

Employees also need to be paid, their benefits must be properly allocated, and their performance needs to be tracked so management can offer promotions and bonuses to the most deserving people.

That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in. AI innovation can help HR departments manage recruiting, onboarding, retention, performance tracking, and a range of other critical employee oversight and optimization functions. Oracle has integrated AI into many parts of its HCM suite, and this has already resulted in internal successes, as CEO Mark Hurd noted at the SuiteWorld18 conference:

If I asked our head of HR, "Would you like an AI application?" I'm not sure what she'd say. But if I told her that I could help her do a better job of recruiting the 2,000 college kids we recruit every year, by knowing things like whether their GPA would do a better job predicting their future success at Oracle, or the school they went to or their major or any of these hundreds and hundreds of correlations… she's going to buy that every single day.

To put this into perspective, Employment Background Investigations found that last year, the average job opening attracted 250 applications, with only two percent of those applicants even called in to an interview. For an enterprise company, hiring 2,000 employees could require drawing from a pool of as many as 500,000 applicants — that’s more people than live in the cities of Atlanta or Miami. The company would need to conduct roughly 10,000 job interviews to find its 2,000 new hires. That’s a lot of work for an HR department. It would simply not be possible to sift through a half-million prospective applicants by hand. Winnowing the field down in a viable way, based on AI analysis, provides enormous benefits to busy HR teams of all sizes.

Recruiting is challenging enough, but retaining and rewarding employees in large organizations can be still more difficult. Employees must be made to feel like they’re part of something worthwhile from their first day on the job. An effective onboarding program can make all the difference between a new hire becoming a loyal contributor and quickly burning out and leaving the organization. A study by the SHRM Foundation discovered that a good onboarding program can make new employees 69 percent more likely to stick with their new employers for up to three years.

AI helps HR teams provide customized onboarding and training programs that address each new hire’s strengths, weaknesses, and particular operational requirements. Hurd aptly compared this ability to personalize training programs to the potential of individualized drug development at Oracle’s 2017 HCM World conference:

There's going to be one drug discretely prescribed for our chemistry as individuals. Same thing's going to happen as we start to evolve here in HR. We're going to get more prescriptive and more specific about individuals and how they specifically work, grow, and develop.

Another added benefit of AI-enabled recruiting and onboarding (among other functions) is the AI systems’ abilities to identify and analyze patterns in the use of these tools. The results of this analysis can help HR leaders improve their organizations’ use of the tools, by identifying and improving methods and processes that work and eliminating those that don’t.

By deploying AI innovations to handle enterprise-scale HCM challenges, human resources teams can better manage their workloads and better respond to the individual needs of their workforce in an effective and personalized way. These same innovations can help the HR work of companies at all sizes by addressing routine challenges and allowing HR professionals to focus their attention on the big picture.

Learn more about how AI in the workplace can help Make Work More Human for your organization.